Winter nights vectoring towards Vancouver, phone dead, music loud over smoke being sucked out the window, airdrumming the cold from your hands. This band calls themselves suburban, but at least two of the members have been playing around the city for seven years. Cheap High have existed for about three. _Subterranean Suburbia_ is their first full-length and marks the debut of Dipstick Records – so you can be sure the onslaught is measured and explosive. Good thing, because it’ll probably be a long time before I change the CD in my car.

From the morbid Kabbalah of Mathieu Bédard:(Translated by L. Langille)

Replacing Sade in a neoliberal context, Ouverture du cadavre de Sade is a book-album which focuses less on the gourmet elements of those looking for scandal and underlines instead the sinister character of the banquet. With its requiem for sick trumpet and darting guitar pulsations, Totenbaum Träger signs this sonic fabric with a planetary plunder from the point of view of its echos. The collages of the books juxtapose snippets of business news and deranged images to form a morbid Kabbalah which has, within the pages that the reader must tear apart, the abject reality of what we collectively draw on; streams of gold replace streams of blood, sperm and tears in these illustrations of torture. It is a reversed alchemy which pushes us until the edge of flesh, where we scream no from all sides.

Nothing is permanent. There are, though, natural phenomena that make us believe in stability: the dance between the sun and the moon, the ocean’s breaths, the watchful eye of the goshawk. We often fall into steady routines, the fixedness of which quell our anxious hearts. The rolling darkness of anthéne’s permanence is a reminder that the world, and everything held in its hands, is in flux. The denseness of the synths mimic the nebulosity of the future, pressing us to savour the present before it transfigures once again.

The Saint Henri crew used to have a record listening salon called Difficult Sundays and basically this new Chris Strickland CD made us cancel us the series. We held them at Dom’s house and this CD made you realize how first-level boss some of these Ivy League Synth and Poetry records really are.

Strickland is a long time participant in Montreal’s avant-garde music community. He famously ran cables out of the top floor of a downtown hippy burrito joint to mic Bishop Street during Garbage Night, a now-legendary gathering place for Montreal’s weirdo music scene back in the mid-oughts. Half the country’s out-music community came up through Garbage Night.

Animal Expert, which took ten years to make, is a catalog of difficult sounds beautifully organized by Strickland. It’s the record the Canadian Electroacoustic Community wishes they’d used to promote their game. And hey, Strickland was a graduate of the Concordia Electroacoustic program so makes sense. There are tones that hang around just long enough, gunshots and laughing through shaky digital passages. The dynamics are absolutely crazy – you’ll run over to your set-up to turn the volume down and then have to reconsider because the shit eases off and some light contact mic chewing and high tone suddenly appear, maybe too high though but reprieve comes in the form of analog wind and chimes. Martial sound effects are eerie premonitions of digital gore, faintly human sounds and horrible breathing like R Murray Schafer soundwalked your ass through the Battle Of Ypres.

Can’t wait for the next Strickland drop. Hope it doesn’t take the guy ten years to bust but hey can’t rush this kind of compositional genius…unless your name is Rushie McGenes but nah mine’s Moskos.

No Problem’s college rock leanings and post-teenage yearnings equate to a back-to-school fever dream in the honestly hour. From purchasing shoes to inviting Kurt Inder to after parties, these young Truro boys conjure up a delirium where things like “cheapcruise.dad.com” can only make sense. No Problem couples songwriting prowess and their own “popsicle rock” to create a serenity, likened to waking up from a mid-day nap, dehydrated with one sock on and barely still on the bed. This nap is satisfying, like unrolling the cuffs of your pants and only finding a little bit of lint.

If someone were to write an EP in a crashing airplane trying to capture the panic in their surroundings as a sort of homage to the turbulent moment before the grand slam the plane levels at the last minute, they might sound a bit like Toucan Slam. The vocals have the effect of a pilot speaking over an intercom, except instead of soothing pleasantries about landing safely, they’re spouting experimental poetry . A joyful and punchy two piece,Toucan Slam fills your cereal bowl and then sloshes it around. This bassist and drummer dynamic duo are a sonic match made in heaven, or maybe just the sky they’re plummeting from.

The world of improvised drone tends to employ the services of laptops, prerecorded samples and electronics in favour of live instrumentation. The world of impro-drone in the West is, for the most part, a digitized wonderland of electronics, synths and CPUS. Moonwood certainly use their share of binary vibrations, but to come across a live instrumental band that achieves that level of heart BPM reducing, out-of-body experience inducing, whimsically meandering drone that we all know and love is a rare thing indeed.

In a dim sub-level zone, a new consciousness arises out of different micro bacteria and algae. It is you and I. Catbag, performing the role of the cauldron-stirrers, remove smoking items from the brine. Everything suddenly seems very immediate, very close. Magic order reveals itself in the discarded piles of relics. M. Wiebe’s voice comes to us, a reassurance of human thought in the primordial sludge. We stumble on the path, but stay true to our course. We negotiate with the giant insects and leeches. It’s not a safe record, but it’s comforting. It’s a place to rest in unease, it’s a place of acceptance. Fear is familiar. The missing hole is filled by an absence.

Kainé and Fili wander free and easy through a soundscape they seemingly create by magic. Unsullied by human discoloration, the experience is exquisitely primal, unblemished. The senses you’ve relied on become useless to you, so you allow your hand to be taken in the music’s delicate grasp. It leads you, guides you. The secret of the cosmos is encapsulated in a single strident note. This mystery is further explored in a quiet conversation between violin and cello. Electronic murmurings remind you that you are indeed human, and that you are a sightless observer. Vocals echo your displacement.

The bedroom is a black hole. Dangling books with fluttering pages. Creased jeans crossing and uncrossing their worn out, indigo legs. A long-lost retainer, spackled with dried spittle and dust. Routine detritus shaken free by the swirling magnetism of a nameless void. Something stirring underneath the crumpled sheets and billowy comforter, pulsing with electromagnetic puffs. It struggles, whispering word-salad. Like an over-stuffed envelope, the bedroom collapses around itself. Contained, but bulging at the seams. Mail it away. Make it someone else’s problem.